Selmer Bringsjord

Selmer Bringsjord is a philosopher and artificial intelligence researcher at RPI. Very smart fella. His research is pretty broad, but he's been involved with computational creativity as a way of making a philosophical point most recently. He co-wrote (with David Ferrucci) BRUTUS, an architecture for generating stories. What's odd about him is that he's trying to get computers to fake creativity, in order to help gather negative evidence for it. Essentially, it works like this, "Look, I can make this computer act in ways that will APPEAR to be creative, and yet, because I know all about how it's doing what it's doing, I know with certainty that it ISN'T being creative." If you know stuff like this, you can say that tests like the Turing Test (which is entirely behavior-based) aren't good enough to know that something is actually being creative or intelligent or whatever.

He's also the director of the Minds and Machines lab, which has a web page at http://www.rpi.edu/dept/ppcs/MM/mm.uc.html, if you're interested. I think it's pretty cool stuff, but then, I'm biased, 'cause I work for the guy. :-)